I know nothing about love, she thought. I don’t know the highest price one should be prepared to pay for it. Or what men actually think about it—about love or about communication. Lothar had categorically refused to engage in true communication.
She spied a cobweb above the mirrored dresser. She thought of her neighbor Grete K?ster and her unrequited love for the local hairdresser. One hot August day twelve years ago, Grete had remarked to Marianne over a glass of sherry they’d allowed themselves in Grete’s cellar: “How hypocritical life is! When we were young, we had to keep our legs shut so people didn’t think we were ‘that kind of girl.’ Our husbands got suspicious if we enjoyed ourselves too much, and then all of a sudden, at barely forty, we were too old. Is there a right age for women and what they have down below? I don’t want cobwebs to set in!”
Marianne hadn’t known how to answer. She’d never looked between her legs and therefore couldn’t say much about cobwebs. Lothar hadn’t been particularly interested either. “Down below” was uncharted territory, as unexercised as her heart.
—
Marianne stood up and went into the bathroom to take a hot shower. Afterward she wound the soft bathrobe around her body, left the room under the eaves and strode barefoot across the guesthouse’s dusty carpets.
She counted twenty-five rooms on the three floors, every one with sheets over the furniture. Many beds were four-posters with romantic canopies. Every room had a door leading onto the wooden balcony that ran around the outside of the building. It was a gorgeous hotel that seemed to have been designed for lovers.
A sign in several languages was hanging on the toilet door. “We kindly ask our guests not to throw cigarettes down the toilet.”
A large door at the end of a wide hallway led into an old restaurant. Opening it, Marianne suddenly found herself standing across from a painting. The view included men and women on the beach: some of them leaning into the wind, others letting it push them along. She twirled on the spot to study the endless picture. A stout church directly by the sea, and several women harvesting seaweed. She had stepped back into a time before Marianne Lanz existed, a time when her grandmother would still have been a child and had as yet no idea that she would one day meet a man who would bequeath his speckled irises to Marianne; a man whose name her grandmother never revealed. All Marianne knew was that her father’s father had borne the same birthmark she did—three flames interlinked to form a Catherine wheel over the heart.
As she was climbing the stairs again, she noticed a concealed door on an intermediate floor. She opened it and peered into a dark room. Only gradually did silhouettes emerge. Dresses: summer dresses, evening dresses, dresses a woman wore when she was going to meet a man. Each dress a memory of the evenings it had been worn—in love, in discord, in pleasure. Now they hung in an ebony chest. Marianne started as she sniffed the sleeve of a magnificent red dress. It was freshly washed.
She continued on her way upstairs and perched restlessly on the bed, gazing around the room. She wished she had been a woman who could live alone and console herself when the lumps in her life—and her breast—got the better of her. But she hadn’t been such a woman. Kerdruc had lifted her spirits, but she knew it was temporary. Tomorrow she would continue with her plan. The impulse remained deep within her.
A whole room to myself. But just for one night, just one. For one night she would see what it was like to be a woman who had a room all to herself.
She put on the chef’s uniform and hesitantly placed the white hat on her head. She was only a little anxious about cooking at Ar Mor. She and the kitchen were roughly the same age: they would get on well.
Jean-Rémy was standing at the stove in Ar Mor’s kitchens, his injured hand hooked into the waistband of his jeans. He passed Marianne a bowl of milky coffee and a croissant, and she followed his lead, dunking the pastry while bending over the bowl and paying no attention to any crumbs that fell into the coffee. The radio was playing songs that she had heard spilling from passing cars back in the seventies—“Born to Be Wild,” “These Boots Are Made for Walking”—and Jean-Rémy was wiggling his hips as he washed vegetables at great speed despite his injured hand.
Marianne had never seen a man dance like this before. She hoped he wouldn’t ask her to join in.
“I’ve thought of a trick to teach you vocabulary, Madame Marianne,” Jean-Rémy announced as he shimmied back and forth. “You have to learn the French and Breton words for all the…trucs.”
“Troocks?”
“Oui, les trucs. This is a truc and so is that,” he said, indicating the table, the knife, a head of lettuce. Everything was a troock.
“A thing?”
Jean-Rémy nodded. “Yes.” He pointed to an unused order pad and made a scribbling gesture. Marianne grabbed a pen and began to tear off the perforated sheets as she followed him around the kitchen.
Jean-Rémy called out words to her, and she wrote them down exactly as she heard them: freego, fennetrr, table. At the end of their tour, she stuck the notes on all the troocks until the whole kitchen was plastered with slips of orange paper. Then they dealt with the larder and the fish.
Jean-Rémy switched to Breton. He loved this guttural language, which sounded very similar to Gaelic. Kig—meat. Piz bihan—peas. Brezel—mackerel. Konikl—rabbit. Tri?schin—sorrel. Tomm-tomm—careful, red-hot! Marianne wrote and wrote; Jean-Rémy smiled. His thoughts turned less often to Laurine now that he was so busy with Marianne.
She had a hunger inside her, he thought. Everything fell into her as if into a deep lake. She wanted to touch and smell everything. The way she’d touched the foodstuffs in the larder! She didn’t maul them; she lifted them up like delicate flowers to catch their fragrance, and her fingers seemed to delve into their soul. When Jean-Rémy looked at Marianne and her heart-shaped face with its large eyes, he was flooded with light, driving out the emptiness that swamped him with despondency when he thought of his boundless admiration for the young waitress. A sense of optimism coursed through him, and he longed to start making plans.